Small-town San Francisco

Yesterday one of my best friends was in Palo Alto for the day, so I drove down there to have brunch with him and hang out. Per his usual routine, he was late, but having not lived in the same city as him for more than two years now, I had forgotten this tendency and arrived a little early (per my usual). The restaurant we were meeting at was near the center of town but a bit off the general path, so the only place I could wander into to pass the time was Whole Foods. Having forgotten to buy cereal when shopping the day before, I found the proximity of a grocery story opportune and popped in to make that quick purchase.

As I stepped through the parting doors on my way out, I did one of those head-turn-followed-by-full-body-realignments—mimicking the path of a guy passing me as he entered the store. Sunglasses blocked my view of his eyes, but I found his face familiar. Unwilling to ever let a potential reunion pass me by, I met his (still-shaded) stare as he turned to investigate my own, and then I queried him by name. Removing the sunglasses, he smiled, and I reminded him of my name, not knowing if someone who knew me as a child would recognize me now, as an adult.

He was born the same week as my brother, and our mothers have been friends ever since. His family moved away when we were young, and in the years between childhood and now, I’ve seen him once that I can remember—we could place where but not quite when, but it was between five and eight years ago. Why I recognized his cheek bones or jaw structure or whatever it was below the sunglasses that assured me, even in such an unfamiliar location, that I was seeing a face I knew—why I recognized him is not clear to me, but the fact of the matter is that I see people I know everywhere in the Bay Area, with great regularity, and it is making the world begin to feel wildly small.

When I moved to San Francisco, I thought I knew two people in the area—and, vaguely, a third. But the first week I lived here, I randomly encountered four people I had gone to college with. I saw two at restaurants, one at a bar, and one on the street. Within a month of my arrival, I had met another at a boutique, a few at the Castro Halloween party, and one more at the grocery store. I seemingly could not turn around without bumping into someone from a past life. For six years after graduating, I had lived one to four miles from my the center of my college world; in that time, when many of my friends also still lived in the area, I bumped into only one of them. Here, 3,000 miles from either of the cities I’ve ever called home, it immediately felt like a place where I would recognize one in every ten people who walked down the street.

It happened with strangers too. One night, I stood in a long line outside the Castro theater, waiting to see the opening show of the SF Indie Film Festival. A few days later, at a trivia night at Mad Dog in the Fog, I sat at a table next to a woman whose face I could not stop studying because I knew I recognized her. Finally, she leaned across the space between us to confirm the same feeling, and that’s when I remembered: she had been in line just ahead of me at the movie. We chuckled over the peculiarity of crossing paths twice in one week; but I didn’t chuckle when, just another day or so after that, I stood in line at a free film at the Embarcadero, and the guy behind me started chatting—only to pause as we clearly began sharing the sensation of already knowing this stranger. It took us much longer to place it, but finally we realized we had both gotten the free passes at none other than Mad Dog in the Fog; he’d been sitting at the same table as my other newly re-encountered stranger. Reasonable, then, that we’d both be at the movie; but reasonable that I knew his face so well after so brief a viewing?

Topping off all these experiences is that I once waited for the bathroom at a restaurant in the Haight beside a guy whom I saw the next night as well—at a bar in Oakland. I was thoroughly astonished by that one, given the distance between venues, as was he. The gaggle of female friends with him tried very hard to get me to believe in fate—but the truth of the matter is that I don’t, and so all this crossing of paths really gets me thinking because it is, to put it frankly, a bit eerie. But as I recounted yesterday’s reunion to a friend, she commented that there was nothing odd about it—not for someone as observant as I am. I hadn’t realized until she said that that not everyone looks at the people around them, studies them, takes mental photos of them; but I do. I people-watch constantly, apparently even when I am not aware of doing so. Maybe this explains everything I’ve just described. But I think there’s another factor at play, which is that this city—this internationally known and widely adored city—is really just a small town dressed up in a fancy glitter.